45 A REPORTER AT LARGE O N the chart, Sandy Hook, the north- ern end of the New Jersey barrier beach, looks like one of the side bumpers in a pinball ma- chine-a five-mile-Iong bumper, positioned as if to nudge vessels ap- proaching N ew York Harbor into the Lower Bay and thence through the N arrows, between Staten Island and Brooklyn, and into the harbor proper. At the bumper's northwestern tip, behind a chain-link fence, is the United States Coast Guard's Station Sandy Hook, to which I came, some months ago, for a week-long visit- part of an extended pil- grimage I had undertaken in order to see today's Coast Guard at work. I've counted myself a friendly ob- server of the service for many years, both as a journalist covering the pleasure-boating world and as a member of the Coast Guard Auxiliary, which consists of thirty-three thousand civilian volunteers who give public courses in boating, check the safety condition of small craft, and assist in search-and-rescue work. Recently, I'd seen evidence that the Coast Guard was undergoing racking changes, whose most obvious cause was the service's chronic underfunding; I'd also heard that there was an internal conflict between "new" and "old" visions of the Coast Guard's function-an iden- tity crisis within an organization that has always made a virtue out of its shortage of resources and the wide va- riety of its tasks, which include military defense, seagoing law enforcement, lifesaving, safety inspection of com- mercial vessels, certification of their crews, pollution prevention, and the maintenance of aids to navigation. Safety at sea, which has been the Coast Guard's principal concern since the end of the Second World W ar, had been deëmphasized, I was told, in favor of military readiness and law enforce- ,,<t::/ SEMPER. PAR.A TUS ,. '" III k , , '... .^ v 6r:;r .-:.- :;...... . 4.> ^ -4 .....':':.: :J '/... - : v . . ''100' ... . <f -.-- ment-particular ly the interdiction of drug smuggling. I wanted to find out the extent to which this was true, and what effect it was having on the ser- VIce. Sandy Hook seemed like a good van- tage point from which to observe the traditional Coast Guard. Since Colo- nial times, the approaches to New York Harbor have teemed with ships and small craft-a condition that in itself means trouble sooner or later. F or seagoing vessels, trouble lies im- mediately below the surface, because the entrance to the harbor, between the Hook and Rockaway, is one big shoal, crisscrossed by relatively narrow channels and marked by lighthouses that resemble each other so closely that they are easy to confuse. The combina- tion of geography, weather, and simple congestion has gone a long way toward making Coast Guard Group Sandy Hook one of the busier search-and-res- cue operations in the country: its four component stations-Sandy Hook it- self; Shark River, eighteen miles to the south; Manasquan, twelve miles farther down; and Rockaway, ten miles across the harbor on the Long Island shore -respond to about two thousand calls annually. As Coast Guard installations go f J "'. '" -'I.) x. K- ' !õ.-.:. .,& . 0- ;r "'I. . \ . . :"'. . :. "'"-øw * ^ ' .,.Øt i @' ' ':t ., ',* ^':? Sandy Hook is on the large side; about a hundred people are stationed here. (Some of them, though, live off the Station and commute from as far away as Long Island.) The main building, housing both Group and Station Sandy Hook, is a vaguely modern brick struc- ture; only the Coast Guard ensign on its flagpole and a sign-"HoME OF THE RESCUE EXPERTs"-differentiate its exterior from that of, say, a small surburban junior high school. Inside, too, the design motif is educational- bureaucratic, reinforced by the smell of floor wax and industrial cleaner and by bulletin boards cluttered with an- nouncements, orders, awards, and ros- ters. Y EAR after year, national statistics show that more than two-thirds of the vessels assisted by the Coast Guard are small pleasure boats in no immedi- ate peril, and the cases during my week-long visit at Sandy Hook merely underlined those figures. There were boats whose engines had quit, boats whose skippers had got lost in the dark, boats that had run out of fuel, boats that had gone aground, abandoned boats that had been torched by their owners (presumably for the insurance ). The first word of most of these